You can accomplish the same thing using the management tool for the SAN, taking recurring snapshots. But in the case of HPE StoreVirtual it’s a licensed feature and it can only occur every 30 minutes so if you need it more often or you’re lacking the license you can use the PowerShell script instead.

If you, like me, have the need to constantly rebuild a lab environment where the servers are installed already but it lacks any configuration you probably realized that PowerShell is you friend. I have a lab environment that I tear down and build up again really often using templates in my VMware environment. In this environment I have all the infrastructure components installed but not configured in Veeam Backup & Replication so whenever I want to show-and-tell I first need to configure stuff. It might take a while to do, so why not automate with PowerShell?

The script below adds a few managed servers, adds backup proxies, creates a Scale-Out Backup Repository with 2 extents, adds 2 WAN accelerators. On top of that it adds a Tape proxy, connects to a HP VSA and takes a snapshot.

I read a really good and useful blog post a while ago from Preben Berg from Veeam describing how to use PowerShell to restore a database from backup to a dev environment. This made me think on another scenario that would be fun to script that might come in handy someday.

What if you have a SAN that you would want do snapshots on once an hour and save some of those historical snapshots rotating the oldest one.

Now for the disclaimer part, this is merely meant to showcase how you might accomplish this. There are no safety features built in. Do not use it in production and use it at your own risk. However if you’d like to do some further testing of your own, you can download a virtual SAN from HP – free of charge up to 1 TB. Nice!

First things first. We need to create a PowerShell script.

Let’s define which volume to use:$source_vol_name = "datastore1"

Then we add a naming convention to use for the snapshots with a timestamp at the end:$snapshot_name = "Oh_snap_"+(Get-Date -Format MMddhhmm)